Apple has done very well compared to its competitors. The main problem the company faces is the unrealistic expectations set by analysts and investors. If Apple were to grow for the next five years at the same rate as the last five years, its revenue would be $1.2 trillion! This is impossible to achieve.

Samsung accounted for one in four of all mobile phones shipped worldwide last year, as its shipments rose nearly 20% to 396.5 million.

Apple's phone shipments grew by 46% to 135.8 million mobile phones.

Nokia's global phone shipments fell by 20% from 417.1 million units in 2011 to 335.6 million.

Demand for the iPad mini was so high that Apple could not make them fast enough, despite many critics suggesting its $130 premium to rivals such as Amazon’s Kindle Fire would put off shoppers.

Apple will face a number of challenges:

1. Its rivals are catching up in the smartphone and tablet businesses it pioneered.

2. Its business still revolves around drawing customers to stores to buy its latest must-have gadgets. But as the cloud is becoming more important, Apple has been forced to learn the rules of a new game. In the cloud, Apple is operating outside its comfort zone – something Tim Cook acknowledged when he apologised for its flawed Maps app.

3. Beyond the core operating system, Apple’s own apps and services are less successful; Ping, Apple’s attempt at social networking within iTunes, was shut down in September 2012. Other parts of Apple’s cloud suite, such as iMessage, the free text-messaging service built into iOS, and Game Center, Apple’s social-gaming hub, are prone to bouts of downtime.

Steve Jobs focused on making great products and ignored short-term profits. John Sculley, who ran Apple from 1983 to 1993, focused more on profit maximization than on product design after Jobs left and Apple almost went bust!

While Samsung has the best phones from a hardware point of view, it still lags far behind Apple when it comes to brand power. This will undermine Samsung’s pricing power and thus its ability to make healthy profit.

Apple is perceived as a luxury brand. Therefore, offering cheaper devices to boost revenue in the short-term is not the answer. The company should remain as a product leader and ignore the analysts and the so-called experts.

Apple released the iPod in 2001, the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010. That's one groundbreaking, revolutionary product in an average of once every 4.5 years. Maybe they can be cut some slack for not having released one in the (not even fully) three years since the iPad.

It would be hard for their previous growth to continue ad infinitum, but they aren't done growing, even if their stock is as a result of investors with unrealistic expectations.

I think it is a bit premature to declare Apple's demise. It's strength is to launch a ground-breaking product line every 4-5 years: the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, etc. The individual updates within each line are also excellent, but it is natural that they don't appear as innovative as the initial launch product. Demanding that Cook produced anoither paradygm shift right away is unrealistic. Give him some time - we don't know what's in the oven.

That said, I'm old enough to remember a time when Sony seemed unbeatable. A some point, a meaner predator might emerge to abate Apple.

Just to put things in perspective, Apple remains an exceptional company. It is just that we have been used to wild expectations from it.

And TV is definitely the ideal next target for Apple. TE mentions competition coming up with "smart TVs", but these companies offer only technical solutions to a wider problem. The TV experience itself is broken. While it made sense to use a remote with numbers when TV channels count was in the single digit, it makes no sense whatsoever in a world with hundreds, and probably more thousands, of possible channels, not counting other channels like Netflix, video on demand and music, which scream for integration.

I don't know how smart TVs should work and haven't seen any compelling model yet, but if there is one company that has proven capable of reinventing a consumer electronics experience and making sense of it within a wider IT ecosystem, it is Apple. Steve Jobs would most likely have had an interesting vision of how TVs should work. The question is: is post-Jobs Apple capable of such paradigm breaking vision?

Much of Apple's success over the last decade was because Jobs was able to convince people that they'd be "cool" by buying Apple's overpriced and restricted products. "Steve knows what's best for you" was the mantra and a lot of insecure types signed on the dotted line because they desperately wanted to be "cool" instead of balding, overweight, and unfashionable. Now that Jobs is gone and that the various limitations of Apple's products are more obvious to more people, it's unlikely the company can continue to live off the "buy us and be cool" schtick Jobs managed to peddle for so long and so well.

Giving some thought, every successful Apple product has been directly related to computing and it has been a progression: Desktop, laptop, phone, then tablets to fill in the gap between phone and laptop. What is left? What do a lot of people have that could be part of this ecosystem. What aapeals to 30 somethings who are young, hip and have cash. Apple TV is just a big screen with something attached and traditional TV is dieing. We already have apple TV (it could be improved).

My money is on a game console. Only XBox is doing it right and they are getting too comfortable with Sony and Nintendo loosing their edge. This relates to computing like their other products, can tie into their current "ecosystem" and even replace Apple TV or iTV. The other competitors in this market (except Xbox) are stumbling.

I am going to start my own rumour... you heard it here first. Game consoles is the next big thing for Apple.

We will see...

New markets become tough to find without leaving your traditional strengths. Apples strenth is bringing a popular UI and form to different computing experiences.

1. Apple is horribly restrained by iOS, which is a single-tasking OS (like DOS). Yes - it can do a tiny amount of background processing on clock-ticks, and iPhones have DMA so that they can play music in the background - but I'm pretty sure that the OS architecture is why they are falling further and further behind on features (e.g. NFC). Making iOS a multi-tasking OS would be a moment of great peril (or disruption at the very least) for them. Blackberry, Palm and Nokia all fell badly by hanging on to outdated operating systems for too long

2. I have seen a study (can link if necessary) that shows that cash rich companies have a strong tendency to focus on execution in existing markets (e.g. by incrementally improving products) rather than innovating in new ones

I wish my company earned $13 billion in a quarter....and that disappointed people.

Apple is a wonderful company producing very desirable products and earning huge profits, but as some sage said years ago, "No tree grows to the sky." Has Apple peaked, perhaps, but if the best they can do from here on in is maintain the status quo it would still be the envy of virtually every other company in existence.

Apple was part of a technology bubble twice: first the graphical user interface (the 1980's Mac) and then the touch screen interface (2000's iphone/pad/tablet). They did not invent either technology but were foremost in seller tactics. They gave people want they wanted. Microsoft is not ailing: it remains the foremost pc software provider. But all those electronic markets are really saturated with competition. So we need a big thinker who can see a new technology that has real sales potential. There are many of those around but I suspect the market is rather burnt out internationally for American companies. The US is no longer seen as the great innovator. If you travel in Asia, you rarely see Apple devices and if you look around in stores Apple is way too expensive. But you do see pc's made all over the world with Windows software. So, if you look back at all those debates between Gates and Jobs, I would say that Bill won hands down.

For any one who was familiar with Samsung before 2010, they made some of the most fragmented and un innovative phones. Heck Samsung had some cool devices, but nothing like the Galaxy III or the current batch of devices that have made it a global leader.

When I look at my TV / Entertainment space, I see a 2K flat screen connected to a set top box (200 dollars,, via an HDMI cables 40 dollars, a universal remote 50 dollars and such ugliness. The Samsung Smart TV is so dumb it can not even adjust to optimal screen size, when I am watching a low def movie on my high def TV. The remote is so dumb it can not recognize the source I am playing with, and I have to switch source. All these point out that companies like Samsung don't get it. They create technologically sophisticated and feature rich products that are not fully integrated. It still is left to silicon valley giants such as Android (Google) and iOS (Apple) to give that holistic integrated eco system. Samsung has done well on the back of Android but lets not forget its own OS was a joke.

The TV world will need such a model again. Google with its YouTube, and google Play store can go a long way to create this new world. Apple needs to somehow get content onto its TV, but thats easier than many people think. Most telco's in North America are now streaming content using IPTV to the set top box. Verizon Fios, Telus OptikTV, as two examples. All apple will need to do, is to get one Telco on board with an exclusive such as it did with AT&T. The Apple TV will be a set top box, and an iOS device and an integration hub. With Airplay apple can take over streaming audio and video in the living room. I would pay a 500 dollar premium if my living room had one large flat slick monitor, no wires, no remotes, no set top box and I got access to all my current cable company channels through the apple interface. Heck I could also then stream wireless content, via Airplay. Now that is slick.

You have to think of apple products as products for those who have form and function in mind. Off course you can get 80% of the pie cheaper from someone else, but I don't want cheaper. I want 100% of the pie and I want it to look good.

Apple hasn't really peaked, in the sense of going into absolute decline. It's more of a gently rising plateau.
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Apple needs to continue the apparent contradiction of being perceived as premium while actually being mass market. Although not easy to carry off, it's not unusual. BMW did the same in the car market for many years.

1. iOS is actually a fully pre-emptive multi-tasking OS, based on the Darwin kernel in OSX, it's just that it restricts third party applications to only run in controlled sandboxes that are not allowed to run in the background. They could relax that restriction, or increase the number of built-in processed that are allowed to multi-task, whenever they like. Android is the same, but has a more relaxed sandboxing policy.

2. People who bet that Apple will behave the same way as other companies in the same situation have a tendency to lose.

Apple has been unequaled in making people buy things they don't need. The iPhone 5: a longer version of the iPhone 4. The iPad mini, or whatever it is called - who would want to buy a slightly smaller version of the iPad? Apparently, millions of people. Perhaps their secret has been in giving their products a false sense of place. "Apple" is a place in your spirit. Unfortunately, it is only a sense of place in the Starbucks sense. You feel as if you're somewhere, but you're really not anywhere. When I use an Apple product I feel the phony comfort of the putative Apple perfection envelop me; I feel the ersatz specialness wash over me like a synthetic balm. Please, G-d, if I should ever be made to use a MacBook in a Starbucks and become one of the millions of bourgeois-bohemian drones, I shall be overcome with dread - spare me, oh lord.

The problem is they don't have Microsoft style dominance in any important market except arguably tablets, and even that is being eroded. They dominate the upper-end of several markets, but are ubiquitous in hardly any (except the now more or less obsolete ipod).

Also, the pace of the tech industry in general is much faster than it was when Microsoft came to dominance, and the pace of hardware advancement has been much faster than the pace of software development has been for Microsoft.

“The iTV, which may be controlled via gestures and voice commands as well as via iPads and iPhones, could be a digital hub for the home. It would let people check whether their washing machine has finished its cycle while they gossip on Facebook and watch their favourite soap.”

Pathetic and not funny comment.
I have been an Apple user since the since 1989. Have had them as a client and many times and have heard this drivel before. In 1995 they had 6 months to live.
The company can't hit grand slams every quarter.